Has the way portals go live changed?

For the past couple months I've been noticing changes in the way new portals are added to the game, and I'm not sure how much of this is bug-related vs an actual feature.

An issue I'm pretty sure is a bug is that the "portals discovered" agent stat is no longer incrementing.

A new change that seems to be a feature is that the reward for an accepted portal has decreased from 1000 AP to 500 AP... but I haven't seen any in game rewards for new portals display in months, so I'm not sure if this has been implemented.

There have been issues with portals taking a seemingly random amount of time to show up in Ingress, whereas before they would appear at the same time as the acceptance email was received. In most cases it's only a day or so. But others take weeks; and the longest delay I have experienced was 95 days (portal accepted Sept 8, key appeared in inventory ~30 minutes ago on Dec 12). With the change to lightship, it seems like portals now have to "sync"? But I'm not sure why some are added within a day and others take so much longer.

If anyone has insight or experience, please share! I have looked through the ingress bug forums but didn't notice a resolution to anything relevant. I did report the incorrect "portals discovered" stats via the in-game support a few weeks ago, but have not heard anything back after being told it would be looked into. If I've missed info that's out there please let me know!